Job Wide Opening: Mac PR Whore
Posted February 18th, 2004 @ 07:56pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I own a small (but growing!) Mac software company. So do about fifteen of my friends, and about 35 of my acquaintances. I excel at writing software. Debugging. Customer support. Drafting and choosing icons. You know: all of the geeky things.
However, I suck at marketing and PR.
It struck me today that that someone who knows a lot about the Mac (and thus why, for example, FTPeel or Rock Star might be cool) and has an interest in public relations could make a killing doing PR work on a freelance basis for about 25-50 small to medium Mac software companies.
Such a person would have contacts at Mac print and web magazines. They would write up press releases and distribute them (no doubt using a pretty standard template or three). They'd monitor VersionTracker/MacUpdate. They'd look for pairings between their clients for cross-promotional deals and otherwise set up things that would increase the business of their clients.
Yet I don't think anyone's filled this position. I'd gladly hire someone at $50/week to do the minimal PR that Freshly Squeezed Software needs. We'd need to sell all of five more copies of Rock Star per week to justify hiring such a person. Three copies of FTPeel. One copy of MailDrop. In other words: it's money we'd gladly spend.
For the guy or gal doing the work, the math is pretty simple: $50/week = $200/month. Work with only 25 clients and you're making a pretty damn good living!
Is anyone up for it? Seriously. Anyone?
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Posted 18 Feb 2004 at 8:29pm #
A geek agent....interesting....now you got me thinking.
Posted 18 Feb 2004 at 8:53pm #
Assuming 48 work weeks/year, that's 25 clients * $50/week * 48 work weeks == $60K/year gross. Not bad, but not great for a person with extensive press contacts. They'd probably also have to attend the major+minor Mac-related conferences, which could easily suck $15K/year off the top.
Posted 18 Feb 2004 at 8:58pm #
I think companies could still be responsible for attending the conferences themselves. I'm not sure the guy would have to go - I wouldn't expect him to go. If I wanted a booth, I'd get one myself.
$60k/year and by "extensive" I'm not sure that's accurate: a contact or two at three print magazines and one contact at about 15 Web sites. I could get those contacts in a week or so - the point is I don't want to. I dislike PR work. Someone that likes it could do it (I think).
Your point is well-taken, though. Surely there are answers, and some enterprising person may have them.
Posted 18 Feb 2004 at 9:31pm #
Well, I did take a PR class in college...
Posted 19 Feb 2004 at 12:06am #
More than knowing contacts, the PR person is going to have to know the products inside and out just like a developer. You gotta understand the competition (ie. Benefits of FTPeel over Transmit or Fetch, etc) as well.
Also, would that $50/week have to go towards paying for PR stuff. For example, FTPeel 2.0 is coming out, and I want to do a massive PR launch: advertising on news sites, a few snail mail flyers to print magazines/prominent mac authors, etc. That would eat the entire paycheck right there, and you would basically be working for free.
Posted 19 Feb 2004 at 12:16am #
I don't think the $50/week would cover anything other than the services that don't cost money. I'd decide whether or not to spend $500 or whatever to advertise, and those costs would be the company's, not the freelancer's. That wouldn't make any sense.
Posted 19 Feb 2004 at 1:26am #
I dunno. It seems like a fairly big workload to me. At ~25 clients, how many applications would that be? Say an average of 4 apps per developer is 100 applications to be working on supporting. Even at an average of 2 per developer, keeping up PR work on 50 apps simultaneously sounds daunting. I've never done PR work, so I have no real insight on the issue, but the numbers don't make me want to invest any time in doing some. I'm sure a lot of it is simply running over boilerplate press releases and updating stuff for the new versions, but if you are expecting ads (website banners, magazine ads, etc.), that could get very time consuming.
Posted 19 Feb 2004 at 2:00am #
But the main thing you'd be dealing with isn't support. It's getting things launched etc. Every developer isn't going to be launching two apps every week! At worst, you'll hit like 5 or 6 apps in a week because of some overlap.
The thing to think about however is what if two of the developers develop competing products?!
Posted 19 Feb 2004 at 8:11am #
I think you're freelance - I don't think Ben Affleck gets mad when his agent gets a part for another of his clients. This PR person would do the best he or she could for every client. It's very simple.
I'm willing to give a copy of MailDrop to anyone who would do this. That would sure make sending press releases easier. 🙂
Posted 19 Feb 2004 at 3:04pm #
I like this idea a lot, and it actually sounds very similar to a certain dream job that I was convinced that I wanted a few years back.
I like the concept, I like the prospect of working with great software companies whom I respect, but I'd say $50 per week is very low for this, $100/week is much more reasonable, but it all depends on how much work would be done per week, of course.
I think it is clear from your price that you aren't looking for an established profesional, but rather the right entrepreneur who is willing to put in the time and effort. It's not like we are talking about half page ads in the NY Times.
I wish I could say I'm in the position to start such an adventure, but I'm close to having my plate full.
Posted 19 Feb 2004 at 3:12pm #
I think $50/week is reasonable given the amount of time I expect to take of this person. With templates, even a product release should result in about $25 in work. With a major release, well, you might use a full month of your pay in one week, but then the rest of the month would be trickle work related to that one big bang.
Bear in mind that I'm talking about promoting small Mac software companies. These companies have one, two, maybe four or five small applications. They're not Adobe. They're not even Ambrosia. $400/month might be 20-50% of their income. $200 is much easier to stomach.
Surely, also, someone could set up a sliding scale. I was just using $50/month as a demonstration. $50 x 48 x 25 = $60,000/year.
Anyway, some people are interested, and the idea is being pursued…
Posted 23 Feb 2004 at 4:19pm #
Keep us up to date on where this ends up going... I might end up being interested in the same thing
Posted 23 Feb 2004 at 5:04pm #
Why not sign up for an affiliate program such as commission junction (cj.com)?
By using such a program, you can have as many people hawking your product as you want, with the added advantage of only paying for results: ie some set fee per item sold.
The only downside is that you need to be fairly strict in terms of how you let your product be marketed. i.e. disallowing spam, etc.
If it works for ebay, amazon, et al, why not for you?